Podcast 18:2 · Apr 30, 04:32 PM by Kukkurovaca
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As I’m somewhat wiped after this week, I don’t really have anything else to say. Other than, keep an eye out for the image I used for the translation differs slightly from what I read and what appears on the site. I accidentally used a slightly older version of my translation when I took that screenshot.
Rough script

Script for April 30th
Introduction

Hey folks. I’m actually back, and although I know no one is listening, I’m still going to chalk this up on the “accomplishment” side of things. I was originally going to flesh out this week’s offering with some introductory material on Nāgārjuna, but I’ve decided against it, as this week has sort of kicked my ass, and I just want to get this over with. I may do a couple dedicated podcasts on the historical background.
Text

ātmanyasati cātmīyaṃ kuta eva bhaviṣyati|

nirmamo nirahaṃkāraḥ śamādātmātmanīnayoḥ||18.2

(repeat)

And in the absence of the self, how will there be something related to the self?

Because of the pacification of the self and what relates to it, (one) is devoid of egotism, devoid of posessiveness.
Commentary

I mentioned last week, more or less in passing, that one of the reasons that Nagarjuna was interested in the issue of whether or not the self can be said to exist, despite the fact that one of the basic tenents of Buddhism is that the self does not exist. That’s part of the reason why there appears to be a dilemma about the self in the first verse—“If the self were the skandhas, it would participate in coming about and passing away. If it were other than the skandhas, it would not be characterized by them.”

In this verse, Nagarjuna is defining a relationship between
The self
That which is “related to the self”
The condition of those who have gone beyond the self

The way that breaks down is this: people who are enlightened are held to be devoid of egotism and possessiveness—literally, devoid of “I” and “mine”; but these qualities that are removed from the enlightened have meaning only in relation to the self—but how will anything that relates to the self have meaning in the absence of the self.

Of course, those of you who aren’t too familiar with eastern religion may not know that the status, properties, nature, etc. of people who are enlightened—that is, people who are supposed to have achieved the ultimate level of spiritual insight and liberation—is always a hot-button topic. Probably becuase these people had to live with each other, go begging for rice with each other, and argue over who got the best donated schwag, and sooner or later this led to them calling each other into question as enlightened beings. So, a lot of thought in this context has gone into precisely defining how enlightenment is supposed to work.

In this case, we’ve discussed, the attribute in question is the freedom from egotism and possessiveness, owing to the “pacification” of the self and what is related to it. Now, what I’m translating as pacification is “śama”, or “peace,” but the Sanskrit root is connected to a variety of meanings, just as ours is—including the sense of pacification. I mention this here rather than in the textual notes, because folks who’ve gone a little too deep into the rhetoric of Buddhist meditation may be familiar with the distinction between śamatha or samatha and vipaśyana, or vipassana—the former refers to the pacification of the mind, and is sometimes described as stopping or quieting it; the latter refers to the more active process of enlightened perception. Vipaśyana generally has better PR in Buddhism, and some are inclined to think of śamatha as somehow less Buddhist;based on a little poking around in some of the earliest Buddhist texts (the Athakavagga and the Parayanavagga) I’m inclined to think that, in fact, śamatha has a more primary role, at least in the early period. But that’s the subject of a different podcast.

By the way, the second line of this verse really goes with the following verse, and it’ll make a lot more sense once we get to them next week, so I’m going to hold off any further explanation until then.

For now, let’s move on to the textual notes.
Textual Notes

And I’m going to just go straight through this, because it’s getting on into the afternoon, and I want to get it down with:

ātman(m7s) asat(m7s) ca(ind) ātmīya(n1s) kutas(ind) eva(ind) bhū(ActFutSing)

nirmama(m1s) nirahaṃkāra(m1s) śama(m5s) ātmātmanīna(m6d)

We have ātman and asat, both in the masculine nominitive singular. ātman, again, is the metaphysical self. Asat, if memory serves, is formed by slapping one of those general-purpose negative prefixes onto a participle (I think a presentn participle) formed from an existential verb.

Those bits are in the locative, which can mean an awful lot of different things, depending on the context and the whim of the writer. In this case, it’s being used conditionally—if the self is something non-existent, then something else.

Next we have “ca”, which is everyone’s favorite way of sticking t hings together in Sanskrit (“ca” means “and”). A fun fact about “ca” is that it comes after the bits it sticks together, so I’m translating it at the beginning of the sentence.

Next up we have atmiya, in the neuter nominative singular, which basically means something related to the self. Then we have “kutas”, which is indeclinable, but has ablative meaning (as I recall, sticking “tas” on the end of something is one of the many things that will make something ablative). Now, the ablative can also mean many, many things. In philosophical texts, it has causative meaning the vast majority of the time; in the case of kutas, it’s a question along the lines of “why?” or “how?” (If you have a morbid curiosity about kutas, see page 290, column B, of Monier-Williams’ dictionary.)

Feel free to ignore that “eva.” “Eva” is, like, totally the Sanskrit equivalent of “like, totally.” Well, not in all cases. But in many cases.

Next comes bhaviṣyati, which is the future of bhū, “to be,” and which is doing a conditional thing relative to the locative bits at the beginning.

Now, on to the third pāda. Nirmama and Nirahaṃkāra are in the masculine nominative singular, and while they pretty much have to refer to someone who possesses these qualities—this is one of the things we’ll get back to with the next verse. “Nir” is a prefix that means something doesn’t have any of something else; “Mama” is a declined form of the first-person pronoun, meaning “my”; similarly with ahaṃ, though that means “I”; kāra is derived from the verb for “do”, so “ahaṃkāra” more or less means to “do” or say “I.”

In the fourth pāda, next up is śama, which I went over prematurely in the last section; śama is modeling that ablative in the sense of causation that I mentioned a few minutes ago. Finally, we have a compound of ātman and ātmanīna (which, like ātmīya, basically means something relating to the self), which appears in the relatively rare genitive dual. And you know what they say about declesions: Gotta catch ‘em all.